Song for Coal: Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson
Date uploaded: January 12, 2015
Yorkshire Sculpture Park will be premiering 'Song for Coal', an immersive audio-visual work by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson in the historic and newly-restored St Bartholomew’s Chapel. The exhibition will run from the 10th of January until the 19th of April 2015 and will coincide with the 30-year anniversary of the UK miners’ strike.
The kaleidoscopic work, installed in the 18th century chapel, explores the physical and cultural properties of coal through rich imagery and song.
'Song for Coal' takes a form based on the flamboyant tracery of the apocalyptic rose window of Sainte Chapelle, Paris. Broken down into 152 separate panels, each section of the rose hosts individual films that trace coal from the carboniferous to the post industrial.
The human voice is a central and powerful element in the composition of this work. Working with Opera North, Crowe and Rawlinson have created a plainsong, based on The Coal Catechism (1898) by William Jasper Nicolls.
The artists have worked with the collection of the National Coal Mining Museum and Drax Power Station, both within a few miles of YSP, in filming sections of the work. They have also employed the rare practice of cannel coal carving to create objects and figurines which were later burned in front of the camera.
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson work collaboratively between studios in Berlin and Manchester. Their work is primarily concerned with the languages of power, with its grammar and with its rhetoric. Their projects address questions around faith, politics, national identity and the environment. Recent projects include exhibitions at Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland and VulpesVulpes, London, and a commission for The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. The artists were selected for the Northern Art Prize in 2009.
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